Because the pix that come up when you search "girlworld" are so fucking depressing.

This article from last weekend’s NYT has been on my mind lately. And not just because it’s filed in the “Fashion & Style” section. The Girls Leadership Institute is a summer camp for teenage girls, teaching them how to act assertively, deal with conflict, stop self-hating talk, etc.

Everyone would benefit from this sort of information, and I’m glad that young women are coming together in a non-competitive environment and having experiences that apparently they deeply need. And I heartily recommend safe spaces in which people are encouraged to act like dorks.

That said, I don’t know what is this “Girlworld.” I don’t recognize it. The closest thing is the bullshit my friends and I pulled in 4th grade when we ganged up on a classmate for being poor. (I still feel really shitty about that. Really.) But in high school? No way. Movies like “Heathers” and “Mean Girls” might have been entertaining, but I certainly didn’t identify with them.

Maybe it was because I had as many male friends as female. Maybe I just really suck at “let[ting my] hair fall over [my] face, cover[ing my] mouth when [I] speak, and always end[ing] declarative sentences like this?” Or maybe it was because I was a proto-feminist. Or maybe it was because I knew I was never going to be in the popular clique, so I went on my merry way as a band/choir/theatre-fag, did my homework, and attended summer camps for mega-nerds.

It’s possible that I’m mis-remembering my own adolescence, and it was positively crammed with drama and tears about my relationships with other girls. But I can only recall two such incidents: once in high school when I said something that upset a friend and I had a hard time apologizing because “I didn’t mean it like you took it,” and once my first year of college, when my BFF from high school came to visit and hooked up with the guy I had a crush on. Most of what I remember was a lot of stupid fun, running out for off-campus lunch, streaking through a county park, going to games and dances and sleeping over and making corny videos for French class.

So, tell me, erstwhile girls: did you grow up in Girlworld? Would the GLI have changed things for you? Was my experience exceptional? And do you think things have changed–for the worse–in the era of the internet and texting and IM? And, perhaps most importantly: wherefore Girlworld?

27 Responses to “Girlworld?”

I was too busy dealing with boy-on-girl harassment to notice if I was a member of “Girlworld.” I had a big blowout with my high school bff that started with her spreading rumors about me and ended with both of us in the counselor’s office. That was the first time I’d ever experienced like that (I was a pretty boring library nerd), and it was devastating, but eventually we made up. I think going to schools that didn’t tolerate aggressive behavior had a lot to do with that, though. And I’m old. No Myspace, Twitter or Facebook bullying.

I definitely had one or two Mean Girl run-ins. One of them, in 7th grade, ended up with both of us in the principal’s office so I could confront the bully in a safe space.

But the hair-flipping, up-talking, trying to act sexxxy thing? Not so much. Maybe this is because I’m old too—the internet, the mainstreaming of porn and pornification of social interactions, happened AFTER my high school years. I suspect things might be different for teenage girls now—it seems to me that there’s been a real amplification of negative messages and negative behavior thanks to the internet.

Also, like PhDork, I was a big ol’ nerd and was relatively unapologetic about it, and about seeking out other nerds to hang with. I was also pretty sharp-tongued as a teen, so bullies and Mean Girls who picked on me always Got Told. Most would move on to easier targets after that.

I was in my high school marching band every year, hung out with my fellow band members and generally avoided the popular cliques of my school. However, the most popular girls in my class were not renowned for their cattiness; instead they were athletic overachiever types.

So no, I didn’t have much backstabbing drama to deal with in my high school years or any time thereafter; being an exceptionally dull and uninteresting person confers that advantage.

I had a pretty good high school experience. I was a band/newspaper/quiz bowl nerd, but I existed in the borderland between the geeks and the popular kids, because most of the popular kids were really smart and in all my AP classes and we were on Student Council together, so we were friendly. One cool thing about my high school was the way they set up the cafeteria: long tables that stretched the entire length of the room. All the junior girls sat together at one table, and all the junior boys sat together behind us, and so on for all the classes, for some reason segregated by gender. It wasn’t a rule, we just sat that way. It helped that my school was small enough (each class was around 100-125 students) that everyone knew each other, but there was no weirdness in sitting next to someone who was cooler than you were. I really think it helped cut down on the cliqueyness in some weird way– sharing meals together sort of brought everyone together.

I had most of my girl drama in elementary schools, from 3-5th grade. I had one-two close female friends, and a rotating set of acquaintances around whom I never really felt comfortable.

I also recognized pretty quickly that I didn’t have the long straight hair, skinny physique or popculture savvy that it took to fit in with the popular girls or the guys they attracted, so I went full nerd and have pretty much ever looked back.

My junior high was the working class version of Girl World – which means a lot less rumor spreading and a lot more fist fights. But most of those girls got pregnant and left school before 10th grade.

My high school was very weird – a magnet school wedged between housing projects on one side and trailer parks on the other, a government grant brought upper middle class white kids from the other side of town for some of the best educational offerings in the nation. There were a handful of girls who tried the popularity/mean girl game (mostly the remnants from the jr high who didn’t have kids or returned after having their kids) but the magnet program meant that the nerds held the majority and thus all the power so the would be mean girls were really only able to play the game amongst themselves. The biggest drama I remember was that I was elected to Homecoming court my senior year…and turned it down. I still don’t understand it – I wonder if I was going to get “Carrie – ed” or if folks thought I was going to do something shocking like have a same sex escort or wear nothing but body paint. I had other commitments and declined the spot – the PTA moms were dumbfounded and furious – wasn’t this what every girl dreamed of? No one had ever turned down a spot on the court before.

My college experience in Penn State’s School of Theatre was much more similar to the high school drama portrayed in movies. It was very clique centered – all about trying your hardest to assimilate and gaining the approval of upper classmen (as I started there at 24 yrs old, I wasn’t keen on being objectified by a 20 yr old boy – and that’s what approval/acceptance was – flirting the right amount etc). A lot of rich kids drinking themselves into oblivion – while I still feel consequences of not sleeping with the right boys or partying with the right people (the summer after my first year I chose to work hard to impress the visiting artist, another girl chose to sleep with him – I have a good friend, she has a career and a union card). I couldn’t shell out hundreds of dollars to go drink with said people at an out of town convention so I was seen as uninterested in going the extra mile.

I had a terrible time of it as a teenager, but I only rarely experienced ostracization from girls. When I was completely outside normal social life, it was mostly the doing of boys who wanted to punish me for not being attractive enough.

But I did experience some of this “girlworld” bullying when I was a young child, like elementary school, with a social circle. It was pretty limited, but it was there.

As I was in high school 40 years ago, my experience was utterly different than what girls go through now, so I won’t bore you all with Tales From The Dark Ages. But I will say that social networking and teenagers is a volatile mix and I’m glad that neither I nor my kids had to navigate those dangerous waters as a teen.

I didn’t have to deal with it; the popular girls in my high school class were popular because they were very outgoing and friendly and genuinely nice to people. Graduating class size of about 375, in 2002.

My sister did not have the same experience. Six years younger than me, her class had the popular bullying types. She dealt with it by removing herself as much as possible, including taking a bunch of local university classes instead of the high school ones.

It is interesting to me that so many commenters didn’t have this kind of experience. Rachel Simmon’s book “Odd Girl Out” really spoke to my adolescent experience. I would say it applied to my junior high years more than high school. Eventually I figured out that I didn’t have to deal with the drama and made friends with girls who weren’t like that. But the point Rachel makes about girls feeling as though they have to be good and therefore hide any aggressive feelings really resonated with me. I think this is definitely a message that girls are given.

High school was certainly not like that for me. The “popular” kids seemed nice enough; we weren’t friends but we shared classes and nobody ever went out of their way to be a jerk to me.

Right now I work (on a volunteer basis) with a group of sixth and sevent grade girls. There is a clear division between the popular ones and the rest. I’ve known many of these girls since they were about five, and the ringleader of the popular group has been this way at least since then. She goes out of her way to make certain girls feel bad despite me and other people trying to get her to stop. Basically, she has been taught that other people do not matter and she can do what she wants. In my opinion it’s because her parents are jerks. She’s doing what she’s been taught to do, and I’m going to keep trying to help her develop some empathy for other people.

I do think that the internet/texting/ whatever has made this situation worse. It’s a lot easier to say something nasty when you don’t have to say it to someone’s face.

I don’t recall being part of Girlworld, either. I had a pretty great time in high school and didn’t get overly caught up in bullying or gossip. Like Dork, I had as many male friends as female, and like Emaloo, my school was, by American standards, very small (180 students in my 12th grade). I don’t think there was a “popular” group, although there was certainly a group that partied harder, and experimented with sex and drugs early (of which I was a part), but by the time all the students split into their various interest groups- sports, art, whatever, there really wasn’t any one left to be “popular” with. No one wanted in to any one else’s group. I also went to a progressive public school that explicitly spoke about equality, sexism, racism, social-awareness and poverty. I just went to my school’s website and it promotes as a educational goal “social conscience”.

My worst experience with bullying was in 6th grade, and I was the bully. A friend and I looked up some statistics about left-handed people- like that they are more likely to be born premature, and have asthma, and then wrote them one notepaper and stuck them in the desk of a left-handed girl we didn’t like. That was pretty cruel.

On the other hand, it’s possible that I was just totally oblivious to drama happening all around me. I try hard not to buy into drama- family fights, breakups, cheating, etc- and as a result, I can gloss over it even when its happening right in front of me.

I remember girlworld sort of stuff from 4th and 5th grade. I think it had a lot to do with the girls trying to act more mature but their image of older girl was a cliched competitive drama queen as presented by t.v. and film. There was drama and cattiness, and backstabbing but it was all very surface; more play acting than reality.
I didn’t stumble across it again till I enrolled in a women’s college and then it was mostly the lesbians.

My high school years were fine — I often tell people my high school was surprisingly free of clique-y, back-stabbing drama. Everyone pretty much tolerated everyone, even if they didn’t always move in the same social circles.

I had a little bit of a tough time finding my niche freshman year, mainly because my middle school years were full of this “Girlworld” nonsense. I was in the “popular” group (although I had short hair, acne, braces, and glasses, unlike some of my prettier co-horts, I filled the role of the “smart cut-up,” I think) and we made a number of girls’ lives a living hell in middle school. Social hierarchy was determined by what table you sat at, and there were two tables: popular and unpopular. If we didn’t like you for whatever arbitrary reason we decided last week, you were kicked out of the group, no questions asked.

I think a lot of this had to do with the rise of the Internet and the popularity, at the time, of AOL IM. It was surprisingly easy to talk shit about someone, or to someone, if they weren’t sitting there in front of you.

I experienced some of this in middle school- maybe not the hair-flipping and ending words on question marks but there were a number of friendships all around me that seemed to just disintegrate in nasty cat-fights, and I was the target of some gossiping and backstabbing, apparently for choosing the wrong “side” except I had no clue there were sides. I was so confused and hurt I stayed home in 8th grade and did a correspondence school instead. Happily, the bulk of this was not continued into high school.

Hoooo doggies. You Harpies who never had any shit given to you in this regard should consider yourselves extremely lucky.

It’s funny, because I actually had a very intense conversation with my best friend last night (it was the last time I saw her before we both leave for college) about this very topic. We’ve known each other since kindergarten, but we’d had very different school experiences for a long time—I was always the perfectionist goody-two-shoes who was desperate to fit in, whereas she was kind of a slacker type until high school, and we didn’t become close until our sophomore year of high school when we were on Scholastic Bowl together. I, admittedly, was always singled out for teasing because I have Asperger’s Syndrome and thus had mannerisms very different from almost all of my peers, even though I didn’t get diagnosed until last year—and that made everything finally start to make sense, especially since I’d always also had a nagging little voice in the back of my head saying, “Something is DIFFERENT about my brain.” Middle school was an especially bad fit for me, since I wanted to be friends with the popular girls and annoyed my mom for wanting to wear clothes from Abercrombie like they did, yet I wasn’t able to entirely suppress my inherent weirdness. My imagination was so loopy and nerdily esoteric that it let to the kind of extremely awkward occurrences that I just can’t make up. (For example, one time in 7th grade science class I suddenly started thinking about the ancient unit of measure known as a cubit, measured from the elbow to the tip of the middle finger. So I stuck out my middle finger and started measuring, having absolutely NO idea what that signified…being an only child, I was a “bubble child” and extremely naïve.) The popular girls whom I tried to be friends with put up with me to my face—I even got invited to some of their birthday parties, but I don’t know if their moms had leverage in the matter—but less-popular people whom I knew from elementary school tried to warn me about them and sometimes I even caught the popular girls talking cattily about me, yet I refused to believe that anyone could single me out like that. I started to drift apart from them in 8th grade, but at the end of the year when we went on our graduation trip to Puerto Rico, none of the people I’d started to hang out with went along, and so I wound up rooming with some of the popular girls. I acted like my usual dorky self during that time and they seemed awkwardly complacent, but then one night my mom, a chaperone on the trip, came to my room and told me that the girls had told another chaperone that they wanted me kicked out because I was, shall we say, too curious about my own body. (I was far from being the archetypal asexual nerd, but my sexuality was the kind of “gross” and taboo stuff the popular crowd refused to acknowledge.) That betrayal utterly shattered me, and I credit my mom for saving my life by being on the trip with me.

However, for a long time I blamed her for being the cause of my whole wannabe period, since she was the one who suggested I be friends with that group (who of course always sucked up to adults) when I changed schools in 5th grade and the group I originally gravitated toward gave me the cold shoulder. I generally became a very bitter and angry person at the beginning of high school, and built a shell of willful desensitization around myself. I still got bullied from time to time—freshman gym class was horrible, as sometimes the popular girls would gang up on me and ask me uncomfortable questions—and I didn’t really find my footing until sophomore year. My best friends from home, with only one exception that I know of, are still my Scholastic Bowl teammates—it was a place for a nerd to flourish. (I had actually done it in middle school as well, one place of refuge where I didn’t have to worry about conforming.) My shell didn’t break until spring of last year, though, when I started having severe panic attacks that got me hospitalized and then put on leave from Cornell for the rest of the year—that’s when I got diagnosed.

I’m still picking up the pieces of meaning from the time I was bullied, and even though he had a totally different experience since he was an immigrant, The Boyfriend has had a very similar process to me. I’ve made some peace with the notion that the girls who betrayed me probably weren’t some cartoonish villains actively seeking to ruin my life, but vapid conformists wanting to get rid of an inconvenience to them. It’s still cruel, but it’s more human, and makes me realize that I’ve done some shitty stuff to other people as well, such as when in high school I felt forced to be friends with a girl who didn’t click with me at all, but she had just moved to the U.S. and seemed so desperate—almost literally EVERYONE else picked on her—that the last thing I wanted to do was be mean, even if it meant being dishonest about how I thought of her.

Sorry about the long post, but this just really hits a nerve for me. I’m still trying to find a balance between suppressing my feelings, which I refuse to do anymore as it’s toxic in that it makes my anxiety go through the roof, and being inappropriately vengeful.

Similar to Cat, I had icky experiences when I first went to high school (btw for non-antipodean readers, there’s primary school (grades 1-7) and high school (8-12) where I went to school).

I was teased/taunted/bullied/etc for being different. I was too much of a square (this coming from a fellow cohort of students also in the gifted and talented programme), I was asexual (because I hadn’t developed enough, and preferred to not wear a bra), I was the outsider, etc. It didn’t help that my parents enrolled me in a high school outside of the district so I could attend the gifted and talented programme. I spent two really aweful years being teased/taunted/bullied by girls who first would come across as being my friends and then do some pretty mean, nasty and dispicable things to me. And I didn’t have the strength back then to tell them off.

I left that school in year 10 and went to a different school where I still attended the gifted classes, and became the mix of nerdy and sporty. Thanks to that year in the other school, and doing pretty good at sports, I was invited to attend a sports high school. In that year 10 school I found my feet. I found that I could somewhat be comfortable in my own skin, though I was pretty scarred from the first 2 years.

My last 2 years in high school was ok. I was still an outsider somewhat, but I had a cohort of friends that I could hang out with, not bullied/teased/tormented, and felt somewhat comfortable.

I was trapped in Girlworld for years as a target. Middle school was awful, and my chief tormentor lived two houses down, which meant I was in school with her all the way from kindergarten until graduation. The discovery of sports helped me out – I met other people, and I discovered skills that weren’t dependent on peer approval. High school wasn’t as bad because I was Honors track with most of my friends and spent all day with the same 30 people who actually liked me.

Honestly, I still have a LOT of trouble trusting women and authority figures, because of the horrible things said and done to me. School administrators didn’t see anything outside of physical attacks as bullying, and even then wouldn’t do much. I was jumped before school one day in 7th grade, in front of a faculty member, who didn’t do a damn thing.

What strikes me is that at the time I felt completely alone, yet i’ve just found out over the last few months that some of my good friends felt the same way – attacked, bullied, crushed by the social structure of our small school. I wish I’d had the courage or skills then to talk openly about what was happening. It would’ve been easier.

That being said, I (finally) in my early 30s can say that I have two women who I am very close to, would call them each my best friend, and would trust with anything, and have. I have also (finally) learned to dance to my own drummer. My distrust of authority is still there, but it’s not so much based in the feeling that they’re ranged against me as based in the feeling that they don’t give a crap about me. (Which I have no problem with.)

Girlworld was a hell of a place for me. GLI would have helped – at least given me a safer space to be me. I found some of that at summer camps throughout my teens and it helped. As long as girls are taught that their place in the pecking order is the most important thing in their life, Girlworld will never go away.

Too tired to say anything profound, but I just want to chime in and say that my adolescent experience was not too different from yours, PhDork, at least the way I look back on it. And in fact, the most girl-on-girl drama happened when I went to a co-ed school; after switching to an all-girls’ high school (for reasons unrelated to drama), girl-on-girl drama (that I was involved in, anyway) pretty much disappeared. Innnnnteresting~

I lived in Girlworld for my whole school life. It’s left me with trust issues and great fear around dealing with conflict with friends and family. A lot of the core messages were reinforced at home, as well.

I think the GLI is an amazing initiative – thanks for covering it. And I’m off to read Rachel Simmons’ books.

To this day, if I hear teenage girls laughing behind me on the train, I instinctively check to see if they’ve thrown something in my hair. It was that bad.

At least from 5th to 8th grade it was. We didn’t have the oversexualization like these kids today and their internet that is for porn, but we did have label obsession. Remember Guess jeans? Oh, did I ever get made fun of for not having them. Then when I did I got made fun of by the same girls for trying too hard to fit in.

In high school it was like a switch flipped – drama ceased to be about groups vs. individuals and became more about individuals vs. individuals, maybe because we were developing our own personalities as almost-fully-realized human beings. It was the grunge era, though, so the whole fashion-obsessed, catty, traditional clique thing was seen as the thing specifically NOT to do. It didn’t hurt that I was an honors/band/newspaper nerd and hung out with weird, smart people who insisted on not following the crowd, but looking back I think a lot of it was teen culture at the time.

I’d hate to be in high school with teen fashion and social expectations being what they are right now. Bring back the 90s! Baggy clothes, messy hair and disdain for the status quo, please!

I had mixed experiences. Preschool to 2nd grade was fine, then a girl came to the school who turned things on their head – she was the classic Mean Girl and a big group of other girls followed her lead. She successfully isolated everyone who she didn’t like for some reason. Later, I became close friends with several girls who were in that class with me, and we all realized that we had each been suffering under her regime – but each of us felt like the only ones who felt so excluded. What a shame we hadn’t bonded together earlier. Even after this girl left, her legacy remained, and some of her closest followers took over.

I changed schools for middle school, though, and loved that – I had great friends and felt very comfortable. Then. Then we moved – to a rich suburb where I felt like the poor kid (although we weren’t poor, in fact probably slightly upper-middle class – but that was poor in comparison to my classmates there). That school was a lot like the one from Mean Girls in terms of its culture – a lot of ostentatious consumption, sweet talk to one’s face and cattiness behind it, etc. At the same time, there was a huge pressure to succeed academically and athletically, be beautiful (designer clothes at age 12!) etc. I wasn’t bullied, but I just Didn’t. Get. It. I didn’t understand the way the rules were played at this school at all. That is one of the things that makes me think that Girlworld as portrayed in the media is largely an upper-middle-class phenomenon.

By the time my junior year rolled around I had found a bit of a niche floating between a few groups, but it took until college for me to get back the feeling of *really* belonging that I had had at my first middle school.

If “girlworld” will give girls the self esteem they need I am all for it. Even the mean girls probably need it because all those actions likely come from their own insecurities. I was extremely insecure in highschool even if it didn’t show. I now know I behaved badly even if it didn’t occur to me then. I went to middle school and high school with Becky. I have actually been referenced in my of her previous posts as one of those girls. I’m sure she can figure out which one of the two I am. Trust me when we get older we realize how stupid we were and do in fact regret those actions. If I haven’t said it before…….. I’m sorry Becky.

@Meangirl1: Okay, first of all, you really were not that mean. And I never felt like you were out to get me or anything like that (although some of the people you hung out with in high school were assholes, but that’s their fault, not yours). Now that we’re all grown up, though, we have a lot more perspective. I think you’re terrific and I’m happy to be your friend!